AirMail — March 2019 Edition

The big news 🔊

Tim Norton — Founder and CEO of 90 Seconds

Proud to be backing Tim and the fantastic team at 90 Seconds again. Video is becoming the dominant medium for the web, and with 90 Seconds it has never been easier to create and manage grade A video content. A big welcome to our friends at SIG, Qualgro & Right Click Capital who joined AirTree and Sequoia in this round

🚀 Antler, a global startup generator and early stage venture capital firm, has launched in Australia. Entrepreneurs that enter the program have two months to start a new company, and work towards getting $100k in seed investment. Antler backs “individuals before they have a a team or business idea”. Antler plans to create 50 businesses by the end of the year in Australia! A great opportunity for those who want to stop dreaming and start building — application link here

🏢 In huge news for Sydney, Atlassian has reached an agreement in principle to become the anchor tenant at the Sydney Innovation and Technology precinct at Eveleigh. This has the potential to become the epicentre of tech in Australia. They also announced a remote working program to find talent right across Australia, not just in Sydney

Topics that caught our eye 👀

McKinsey: Australia’s automation opportunity — “AI presents an enormous opportunity for national and personal income growth”. Daniel was thrilled to have been part of this report’s advisory committee alongside Alison Deans, Catherine Livingstone, Daniel Mulino, and Amit Singh

A good overview of the specific problems faced by AI-first startups and how to address them from our friend Matt Turck at First Mark. If you find yourself in NYC, make sure to get along to his Data Driven NYC event — it’s a must

What’s on? 🗓️

27 March (Sydney): James is heading down to the Safe Encryption Australia Forum — we want to throw as much support behind the industry associations, individuals and organisations seeking key amendments to the new encryption laws as we can!

10 April (Sydney): James is mentoring the current teams on the Founder 10x program at UNSW. Looking forward to seeing them on stage at demo day on the 10th!

16 Apr (Sydney): Jackie is heading down to the Incubate Demo Day to hear from class 13!

15 May (Melbourne): John is speaking at the Future of Work Summit — he’s excited to take the stage with the team at Expert360 to talk more about the “freelance economy”, and Joyous to discuss why “it’s now about people, not jobs”!

Flurosat was awarded $3m of government funding to help bring together the mountains of disparate data across farms and turn agri-businesses into data-driven machines (also, some tips from Anastasia on how to secure grant funding)

Hyper Anna have announced two new product features: ‘What Caused This’ and ‘Drill Down’ — check this video out to see how they help you gain deeper insights into your business

🍾A big congrats to the team at Pet Circle for winning the “Fast Movers” category’ at the All Star Bash 2019 (that celebrates the achievements in Australian retail over the past 12 months)

James went into bat for startups and explained why we need the Government to start conversations now with the ecosystem about R&D tax. Uncertainty is the worst

John spoke with the team at SouthStart about the risks of “smarter” AI, when to introduce your kids to technology, whether the Government should be in charge of your data, and a range of other data-related topics